Thanks for not being mad Ms. Jean ,i do get overeager sometimes and totally miss stuff. Love your sunny bottom birdie. I think those are great pictures! That's definitely the little bird i have been seeing all week. They are fun to watch because they are so quick. They are really hunting the grass for bugs i guess because they are constantly on the ground flashing their little yellow bottoms :-) Thanks so much for the pictures. Awww Brenda, you dont have the little fluffy vacuum cleaner wrens? They have so much personality and are so much fun to watch. They are so naughty too :-) i just love love love them! They follow all the other birds around and see what they are interested in and then they start liking it too. That of course makes the other birds mad so then the chase begins and it looks like a game of peek a boo because they are so small and fast the other birds can never catch them! LOL....If one bird likes a nest box then the little Carolina wren likes it. If somebody hides food then the little wren eats it. If somebody is guarding a certain tree then that is the tree the wren wants to be in. If somebody likes guarding a vine then thats the vine the wren wants to be in, and on and on and on. They are so mischievous and fun to watch , i laugh all the time at their antics. They are just so naughty and cute. Wish i could send you some but i only have one pair and i would surely miss them just to much. They even pick the bugs off of our cars and every bug off every hanging plant too. Yep they are just so wonderful. Little reddish fluff balls with big beaks and big voices! LOL....I hope you get some, Brenda they are wonderful. I saw a male Northern flicker today and i never realized how big they are, and their beaks are huge too! Lol...I never ever want to make one of them mad. So pretty though and very shy. I have always heard them but never saw them. Very exciting for me to finally put a real face (and beak) to that wild call they have. He hung on the very tip of a branch to pluck dogwood berries and the northern mocking bird that guards that tree didn't mess with him either. I dont blame him! LOL...Bonnie

It's still early in the season here. Pruning, otherwise known as Me vs. The Garden is still progressing. Sort of. At this point, I've done all the 'easy' roses. The ones that go snip, snip, snip. What's left are things like Queen of the Prairies and Clair Matin, the ones that need saws to cut out old canes that should have been cut out years ago, except that I never bothered to get the saw out of the garage. The early roses have started blooming. R. hugonis, R. primula and Glory of Edsel. The lilacs are in full bloom, the doublefile viburnum is turning white, and the first of the tree peonies are opening. The early iris are fading, so it's time to anxiously await the opening of the first TBs. The bloom stalks are there, the flowers are starting to show color, but are at least a couple of days away. Having drastically redone irisdom a couple of years ago, I'm refusing to mess with the bed until it starts crowding. The result is a bigger and better show every year. This is the way it's supposed to work, but doesn't always. People are starting to drop hints about garden visits. That means it's time to start taking the quarry work seriously again. Most of the beds are dug to about a foot, then amended. Since we start with heavy, rocky soil, the result is quite good rose soil and a pile of rock. The exception has always been a relatively small area with bedrock near the surface. It started off garden life as an iris bed. The small, early iris species that were placed there didn't mind the almost total lack of soil. It was close enough to their native habitat. But over time, as the garden vision changed, it was thought desirable to have a deeper bed as a more normal extension of the rest of the garden. So the rock had to go. The rock is still going, and the excavated topsoil still sits on a tarp in the middle of a garden path. I refuse to even think about how many years this has been true. Last summer, I got the hole to a point where there is deep enough soil for most things. However, the hole produces about the best paving stone I've dug here. Paving stone has uses, and if I don't dig it out of that hole, I'll have to *horrors* BUY it.

I never have much great luck with bush beans in my raised beds, and I pulled them out tonight. We did fine from them, but they are done. A few tomatoes aren't great: I purchased them from the same source. I could have overwatered them, or it could be that particular bed, or they could just have come with problems....I just prune off yellow foliage and let them keep on because they are loaded with fruit. Okra has been weird this year with me too. They just SAT and did nothing for weeks until I gave them some cottonseed meal. Other forms of nitrogen seemed to do nothing for them, but that worked fine. Next year I'll try manure in the planting hole. Seems they enjoy a stronger dose of fertilizer at a younge age! My squash and watermelon are SLOW but that's OK. Planted late, and they are in a very weedy area and competing with the mullien I planted. I am sure they will do just fine and eventually produce well. I am also going to plant more melon, I like to plant them in stages. Actually as soon as this godawful heat passes I have more tomatoes, sweet potatoes and melons to put in the ground! My limas are going everywhere. The package said bush. THEY ARE NOT BUSH, lol. Ah, well, as long as they make limas I'm good. The bush and climbing beans are doing well. I pulled out one summer squash and planted two hot peppers in it's place. Three more summer squash are meh. Not giving me much, totally full of borers. I smartly underplanted these with more eggplant, which are now flowering and beginning to produce. I've had herbs out the wazoo. This was the first year for blueberry harvest off of dwarf plants. They were trial plants, and haven't done much but were good this year. They are planted in a bed of strawberries which was OK. Not as many berries as last year. I need to add more "good stuff" to their bed and replant them in the fall. Sweet peppers are beginning to fruit. I've had more cucumbers than I know what to do with from just 6 plants!!!! They went NUTS (and other other plants are just starting to produce!) and I now have a few dozen jars of pickles, have given away two bags, eat at least 3 every day (so does my DH). It's been wonderful. We still have chard and kale but tonight's kale was really cabbagey tasting so I guess it's time to pull it soon (it is shading some blueberries yet, so I hate to pull it until heat passes).

Hi Quinn! Great to hear that most of your plants and hoyas are alive are no worse for the slight neglect this winter. Congrats on all the new growths and vines that are showing up! That is such a nice thing to see. My best surprises as far as growths are my small Patella has a couple of new vines and new leaves are slowly emerging. I'm very excited about my Elliptica as well and my Sp. square...both growing nicely! But the best surprise of all came yesterday when I noticed that my sigillatis that had problems this winter(vines started declining and drying up) is finally showing some signs of recovery...I found some teeny tiny new growths on some of the vines! I hope this one recovers as its one of my favorites! Keeping fingers crossed! Good to have you back posting again!